from the workingman's point of view. As Tugan-Baranowsky himself points out, the change in the character of the industrial cycle has benefited only the capitalist class, and the position of the working class has become much worse for it.
Of course the chief reason for their exultation over this change, or at least that of some of them, is their belief that the doing away with the acuteness of crises does away with the possibility of the occurrence of the great and final crisis, the social revolution, which they cannot imagine otherwise than as a sudden crash. But this cataclysmic conception of the breakdown of capitalism is not part of the Marxian theory, and has, at any rate, nothing to do with his theory of crises. The disappearance of the acuteness of commercial crises does not in any way affect their revolutionary influence, if their influence be necessary for the coming of the social revolution. For the remedy is worse than the disease as far as its influence on the condition of the working class is concerned, except, of course, to the minds of those who imagine the great revolution as the work of a hungry and desperate mob driven to distraction and destruction by the immediate lack of work, food and shelter. The mildness of the change from one phase of the industrial cycle to the other does not lessen the mass of misery produced by it, nor does it indicate any lessening of the contradictions of the capitalist system of production; it does not therefore affect the probabilities of a social revolution, except if we imagine it as a sudden cessation of all economic activity. The real question therefore is, not whether crises have become less acute in form but whether the economic contradictions which produce them have lost any of their acuteness. This brings us to the question of the adaptability and expansiveness of the capitalist system of production.
That capitalism has obtained a new lease of life by embarking on the sea of Imperialism is assured by the Revisionists, although none of them ever attempted to care-
